Production Musings

AE Scripts – I love ‘em

// April 15th, 2009 // Thoughts

It’s been too long since my last post.  We’ve been up to our neck over the past 3 or 4 weeks in video projects and the usual tasks.  I have much to get caught up on.  Until then, here’s the most recent project.  First, a note about After Effects scripts.  Up until this past month I’d never used them.  Uhm, hello?!  They make life easier.  We found one to help us with subtitles (which I’ll write more about later) and another to align objects to a grid.

For Easter, we were expecting above average attendance.  One of the things we wanted to communicate is the life that Jesus offers to all of us and the reality of that.  We wanted to share stories of people whose lives have been changed by Jesus since they’ve chosen to follow Him.  One of the elements we used to help support this message was a mixed media element.  The band performed Matthew West’s song “The Motions” to an animation we created.  It contained photographs from all of the baptisms from 2006-2009.  The question was, “How can we display this in an interesting, attractive manner and be impacting?”  Judson Lee created the performance click track on the Left and some synth/filler on the Right to be mixed in at front of house.

Of the hundreds of photos, we selected the top 80, cropped to 16×9 and resized to 800×450.  We ran the Layers2Grid script found at aescripts.com and it worked like a charm.  After wasting about 7 hours figuring out why nesting one comp into another creates blurry photos, I finally got it right.  Here’s what we came up with:

Ok ok, I apologize for the Mac look rip-off in advance…I couldn’t resist.  Here’s a version with no click, piano only.  I can’t post it with “The Motions” due to synchronization rights: